After Progress

In this episode, the third in our trilogy about how and why the Enlightenment has not been able to deliver on its promise of universal liberty and equality under the law, Raven and Gregory take aim at colonialism. They use Social Contract theory as a lens to understand how “enlightened” liberal democracies sanctioned the domination, displacement, and dispossession of many millions of indigenous pe...

Despite its promise of universal liberty and equality under the law, the Enlightenment confined democratic citizenship exclusively to white men based on racist presuppositions about who could be counted as full persons. Last time, Raven and Gregory drew on Carole Pateman’s theory of the Sexual Contract to explore how the original social contract that established the modern political economy denied...

The typical high school textbook describes the American Revolution replacing the old hereditary aristocracy with a liberal democracy that guarantees all people protection of their natural rights to life and liberty. It turns out, however, that those vaunted Enlightenment principles excluded women, systematically and intentionally. Contemporary champions of American democracy often insist that when...

How are the ideas that shaped the modern world implicated in the crises that now threaten human civilization? In this inaugural episode of After Progress, Raven and Gregory begin to unpack the revolutionary ideas that helped make the modern world and ponder whether and how these ideas – which have been integral to so much of what we consider progress – have led to the tangle of intertwined crises...